A familiar practice for those who use small firearms is to reload a casing after a bullet has been fired, for economy and good environmental practice. This practice is carried out with center-fire cartridges of the kind that are used in a pistol, rifle or other small arms weapon.
To reload a spent casing, the old primer cap is removed and replaced in the base, a new powder charge is placed within the cavity of the casing, and a new bullet is secured in the open end of the casing. However, it may happen that a new bullet will not be as securely held in the casing. This can be attributed to a slight permanent outward deformation of the open end of the casing during firing of a bullet. Thus as taught by the prior art, some remedial shaping is needed.
Manually operated devices for accomplishing such reshaping are variously referred to as, reloaders, presses and dies. Many are described in the patent literature. See for instance, see Heers U.S. Pat. No. 4,329,906, David et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,766,798, and Bond et al. U.S. Pat. No. 7,395,746. Generally, the devices apply appropriate forces to a casing for reshaping it, and in instances enable installing a new primer cap, powder and a bullet. There are reloading devices which incorporate spring loaded internal parts, such as are shown in these U.S. patents: Alberts U.S. Pat. No. 4,188,855; Roller U.S. Pat. No. 4,984,501; and Beebe U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,465. See also Koch et al. U.S. Patent Publication No. 2004/0025677.
One recent improvement in casing construction is described in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2017/0030690 “Fire arm casing and cartridge.” The improved casing is formed of two mated pieces, compared to the traditional one piece brass casing, and the casing has significantly lighter weight and thinner but stronger walls of stainless steel. While the new casings offer a greater number of reloads prior to metal fatigue/failure than do traditional casings, there is a need to avoid damaging such casings inadvertently during the reloading process.
Furthermore, the aforementioned new casings are best made of work-hardened austenitic stainless steel, which is much harder and stiffer than the brass of traditional casings for which the prior art reloading devices have been intended. Substantially more force is required to achieve resizing and flaring, compared to reshaping traditional brass casings of the same ammunition caliber. It has also been found that substantially more force is required to disengage a new type casing from a typical prior art reforming die. For example, where it might take an estimated disengagement force of about 50 pounds to pull a small caliber brass casing off a die, for the new type casing that force may be 100 to 300 pounds for the same die.
The present invention seeks to improve the way in which the reloading process is carried out, with respect to how a casing is re-shaped and to deal with the special problems associated with new kinds of casings.